The Typhoon Season

Typhoons... Numbered... Almost like kings succeeding the reign of one another... The one happening now, number 15, has attacked the town of my youth, the town where I spent two exciting years full of exploring and discovering. I was envisioning wind surfing for the weekend. But really. Maybe not the best time to fight with the nature. I will be swallowed by it inevitably. Whether it will be the wind or the water, if only I enter the sea, I will be gone, I feel it. I've been avoiding the water ever since what happened happened. Ever since the thread that was connecting me to the reality of life got cut - brutally and without hope. I'll spend the day tomorrow locked in my room like in a shark-viewing glass boat that takes people underwater at glossy resorts. It will be dark and raining. Who knows what creatures will be cutting the raindrops flying through them - birds shall hide... Glossy resorts, I said? Only it's not a resort here, though it once were, when the whole experience of migration felt new, fresh, and meaningful - exactly in connection to the  act of migration. When I remembered the moments - the flight, the moving, the feverish customs, flu-struck body pain... I don't know where I am anymore. And whether where I was is the past or some other time scape? It should not be the past just because I left it behind or that I left from there - to here. It is living its separate life which is parallel to mine. And when I call home, it's the same date and day there (is it?), but why does it feel like I talk to the shadows of the past, not knowing even if they exist anymore in the realm of physical reality? The time is lineal in my culture, but is it really? And is it fair to put behind those people and places that constituted something you did in the past or something you were or something you thought you were? How real are they - those memories? Revisited, reconstructed, reinterpreted, rationalized over and over... It's going to be 10 years soon ever since I touched the ground of this new floating land - the land that used to float in the domains of my desire, but which is floating on its own now - shaken by quakes, soaked by rains, driven mad by unpredictable tides... The waves are not linear anymore either, they are not directed at the shore - to touch the edge of the sandy ground and be gone - they became insane, intermingling with each other, one rushing to the East, another - going around itself in endless rounds, reproducing the forgotten ancient chaos... How long will it take these waves to uproot the reality of mine completely and to make me able to move further - to the lands that are not standing on top of the whales' backs, but have their roots reaching through the crust down to the kingdom of the unbreakable inner core? I feel it coming  - the fatal thrust of resurrecting willpower, ready to throw me to where it will thunder - ready to make where I am a part of what I were and to redo my history forever...

The Way of Death, the Way of Life

My friend An Hwi Mi, a Japan-born Korean artist painted this piece for me, called "The way of death, the way of life". I just fixed it on my wall and wanted to share...

An Hwi Mi's homepage

The Night Walk

The street is lit by the light of the moon - this eternal light that reveals the inner nature of the surrounding things, this light, the cold mildness of which is so predictable and yet unknown, which is forever yours and yet cannot be possessed in terms comprehensible to human beings... It warms you up in the most gentle and promising way, whispering its mystical lullabies into your ear and leaving signs in its shadows as if they were meant for you only, leaving you questioning about the meanings of existence. The moonlight's balance of color and light is perfect in the most divine way - it lacks the tiring heat of the sunlight or its exhausting brightness, the light of another nature, that only truly happy people can bear... The moonlight - silent, tender, and yet cruel, it is always there and always responding to you walking under it, within it, on it, deprived of the magnificent indifference of the sun, a luxury allowed to those who are so generous in their givings... Its silence carves out the heartbeats of the ones longing to it, cooling down the passion of their hearts, transforming it into the emotion of another kind... This capturing light of the moon is calling me to it, night after night, caressing me through the rice-paper screens and lace curtains of the bedroom, making me wake up in the middle of the night and walk - walk uphill - towards the forest spread on the hill a mile away from my house, where giant branches of the old trees are crossing over my head, carrying the weight of their moon-lit wisdom. Farewell, those days when the sky was big, it is in my palm now, this dark, silent, deep, somehow desperate sky, desperate to cover us all with its blessing! I've learned too soon, the sky cannot cover as even though it is stretched above our heads, it is connected to another universe and nor it separates neither protects us from it. We all are one step away from being swallowed by it and no one knows how we will look when there - will we be shadows of us in real life or locked into different bodies and forms? Will we survive the memory of things and happenings or will it haunt us in the same way we are reminded of all undone, unfinished or feared through our dreams and nightmares? I know it is all broader than it seems - in meanings,  in spaces or anything said to be measurable as nothing can be truly measured, no limit there is to one's power of life both within and beyond the physical existence...

 Here come some pictures I took when walking at night following the moonlight...